Leadership to Advance Innovation for Digital Healthcare Transformation

Introduction

The competitive environment that organizations are facing today is influenced by choices for the adoption (Rogers 1995) of different modern technologies and evolving customer expectations that can have an impact on business processes. New models require leadership for digital business transformation which are continuously being modernized to address gaps in the delivery of customer value created to challenge new digital competitors online having superior technologies for instant service delivery with minimum or no human interactions. The essential notion of ‘time-based service management’ which was a critical factor in earlier studies (Rockhart 1982, 1979; Rockart and Van Bullen 1986) for business, is now based on service on demand by customers and instant delivery of services via the internet in ‘real time’. Therefore, organisation are now competing for instant delivery of services in real time which is a critical deciding factor for the customers- how and where such services can be used, which also provides flexibility in customer choices. The generic term “organization” is used to refer to both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, as well as both product and service organizations. The traditional use of a top down approach to developing strategies that address vision and mission, and filtering these down to lower tiers to influence policy and operational level decision making, is too slow to address the rapid changes occurring today outside the organizational ecosystem. In fact, academic and practitioner discussion on leadership is calling for alternative approaches to developing strategies. These approaches include bringing cross-industry thinking (e.g. bringing a new CEO from a different industry segment to infuse fresh ideas (Sylvers, 2019)) and broadening the performance metrics from near term to longer term (e.g. move from shareholders to stakeholders, including customers and suppliers (Ramey, 2019)).

Both these approaches implicitly recognize the need for leadership today to address fast-changing customer expectations and the multitude of external competitors who are willing to address these expectations. This demonstrates that markets are driven by customers who are very knowledgeable and aware of different information to make decisions. In this context leadership is becoming an essential factor for modern digital environment, in which a technology is used to create different business models to address customer expectations and drive growth in new and existing markets (Chan, 2018). In fact, the role CEOs and CDOs (Chief digital officers) is being debated as organizations engage in digital transformations to address the complex market dynamic (Siebel, 2017, Tumbus et al, 2017). Much of the discussion on digital transformation (i.e. organizational transformation in the digital age) is focused on organizations build agility to adapt for changes that can quickly improve inner business structure and streamline process delivery. Such agility may come from creating two different organizational models (one to run at a regular speed and the other to run at a faster speed) (Bossart et al, 2014), using best practices (Ivancis et al 2019)). using a mix of internal and external resources to design and develop services to address value gaps (Lusch and Nambisan, 2015), or even rethinking and shaping the organization around the value it creates or co-creates with its customer using evolving business models (Weiland, et al, 2018). The premise behind all this thinking is the need to balance the organization’s effort to seek stability and growth with the instability that arises when the changing ecosystem from outside the organization demands continual innovation and adaption to create value for the customer.